Mr. Blake and Miss Dent
In “The Five-Forty-Eight,” Mr. Blake is the selfish, sexist, misogynist business exec who gets the tables turned on him after he rejects a secretary following a meaningless one night stand. Miss Dent is truly dented and seeks a measure of revenge on the train headed back to Mr. Blake’s suburban life and she’s packing heat to get it.
Mr. and Mrs. Westcott
Jim and Irene Westcott are the recipients of “The Enormous Radio” which allows them—mostly Irene—to secretly hear conversations taking place among the other residents of their building. Jim becomes increasingly concerned about his wife’s obsessive eavesdropping and the way that learning the dirty little secrets of others has brought about a change in her personality.
Neddy Merrill
Neddy is the narcissistic and ultimately oblivious title character of “The Swimmer.” One day he decides to make his way home by swimming across each of his neighbors’ swimming pools and the day becomes an odyssey exposing his failures and insecurities before leaving him as he bangs fruitlessly on the door of an empty home.
Johnny Hake
At the opposite end of the spectrum Neddy Merrill is the title character of “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.” Essentially just another of Cheever’s many suburban husbands and fathers, Johnny is forced by circumstances into a life of crime as a thief. He makes his way across the barren moral landscape of suburbia much like Neddy, but at the end there is the sunshine of redemption that the swimmer never experiences.
Pommeroy
The first person narrator of “Goodbye, My Brother” is surrounded by fairly large cast of characters in this story of sibling rivalry, family reunions and things best left unspoken for the same of family unity and individual sanity.
Charlie
Charlie is the narrator of “The Reunion” which recalls a day from his boyhood when he is to meet his estranged father. He naively believes that the meeting with truly be the reunion of the title and lead to a better relationship, but the truth is as bitter as the liquor which is the cause of the separation in the first in the place.
The Wrysons
The Wrysons are yet another suburban couple populating Cheever’s world, but neither of the title characters narrate their own story. Instead, a third-person narration makes this tale less about the characters than the tone. The name of the protagonists give away that tone and throughout the entirety of it, Cheever manages to remain true to the promise of presenting this tale of suburbia as an exercise in wry, irony humor.
